Online calibration of exterior orientations of a vehicle-mounted surround-view camera system

Abstract

The increasing availability of surround-view camera systems in passenger vehicles motivates their use as an exterior perception modality for intelligent vehicle behaviour. An important problem within this context is the extrinsic calibration between the cameras, which is challenging due to the often reduced overlap between the fields of view of neighbouring views. Our work is motivated by two insights. First, we argue that the accuracy of vision-based vehicle motion estimation depends crucially on the quality of exterior orientation calibration, while design parameters for camera positions typically provide sufficient accuracy. Second, we demonstrate how planar vehicle motion related direction vectors can be used to accurately identify individual camera-to-vehicle rotations, which are more useful than the commonly and tediously derived camera-to-camera transformations. We present a complete and highly practicable online optimisation strategy to obtain the exterior orientation parameters and conclude with successful tests on simulated, indoor, and large-scale outdoor experiments.